Friday, 29 November 2013

The current monetary system negatively impacts on the environment in several ways. First, it creates a business cycle where recessions are positively correlated with the removal of regulation protecting the environment. In addition the increase in government debt associated with large recessions and financial crises can eventually lead to cuts in government spending, which may include investments in technologies that may benefit the environment. Furthermore, banking is completely undemocratic, and this can lead to individuals helping to fund lending to industries they would otherwise not wish to. Finally the current monetary system may create a growth imperative which makes the steady state economy desired by environmentalists impossible.

Under a reformed system, a major cause of the boom bust cycle – the creation of money by banks when making loans – will be removed. Hence the economy should be far more stable, with fewer and smaller recessions. Consequently, there should be less pressure on government to remove regulations that protect the environment during downturns.

Smaller booms and busts will lower the need for the government to engage in countercyclical spending, or bail out banks in a financial crisis. This should free up money, which could be used to increase spending on the research and development of green technologies.
Another aspect of the reforms that would benefit the environment is the directed nature of the Investment Accounts. Individuals and organisations would have a choice over how the money that they save is to be used. For example, each bank would provide a range of Investment Accounts with different interest rates and risks attached to them. Each account would fund a different broad sector of the economy. So, a typical bank might offer a variety of Investment Accounts, one of which funds mortgage lending, another that funds small and medium sized businesses, a third that funds consumer lending, etc. Banks could even market accounts based on their ‘greenness’. For example, a bank could offer an account that funded only ‘green’ businesses, and excluded big energy companies, or companies with a history of pollution. In reality the possibilities are endless. Crucially, individuals would no longer be unwittingly funding activities that they disagreed with.
As a result, the investment decisions of banks would start to reflect the investment priorities of society.
In addition, the act of choosing not to put money in certain types of Investment Account (e.g. one that funds companies that damage the environment) will decrease the amount of funds that banks have available to lend to a particular sector. Other things being equal this should lower the quantity of lending and increase the interest rate on any loans to that sector. This will lead to an increase in costs for these companies, potentially making any new investments unprofitable. Alternatively, the increase in costs may be passed on to the consumer, which will lower demand for goods from companies that damage the environment.

Likewise, an increase in the money placed into Investment Accounts funding green companies will lower the cost of funding to these companies. Again, this benefit could be passed on to the consumer or reinvested. This will change relative prices, altering the demand for the products and creating a market mechanism that will lead people to favour products produced by environmentally responsible companies on price grounds.A further aspect of the reforms that could benefit the environment is the removal of the growth imperative in capitalist economies. This would allow the kind of steady state economy favoured by many environmentalists. Indeed, one of CASSE’s (the Centre for the Advancement of Steady State Economics) fifteen policies for achieving a steady state economy is to “Overhaul banking regulations, starting with gradual elimination of fractional reserve banking, such that the monetary system moves away from a debt structure that requires continuous economic growth.”

Why does a reformed system lessen the growth imperative?

First, in a reformed system inequality should be lower as ‘rent’ is no longer being paid on the entire money supply. Lower inequality should lower borrowing and working hours by people previously attempting to ‘keep up with the Joneses’’.
Second, in a reformed system continuous borrowing is no longer required merely to maintain the money supply. Accordingly governments need not fear the deflationary effects of a credit contraction (although they will want to maintain a certain level of lending for other reasons) and so can remove any incentives that promote excessive indebtedness and as a result economic growth.
Third, as bank lending no longer increases the level of purchasing power in an economy, asset price bubbles in essentials should be less likely.
A low propensity for asset price inflation should lower the required levels of borrowing in order to purchase a house, which push people to work harder.
Fifth, any increase in a bank’s capital will not remove money from circulation, and loan repayments will not destroy money.
Consequently the growth imperative which applies to the current system (as postulated by Binswanger (2009)) will not apply. Even if some economic actors choose to hoard money in their accounts (effectively taking it out of circulation) the central bank can easily offset any negative effects by increasing the quantity of money spent into circulation.

This is an extract from the book Modernising Money which explains in detail how exactly can the monetary system be fixed.

Here you can read the Positive Money system explained in Plain English.

Join the Campaign!

Join the 16,138 of us who know that our money system needs fundamental changes if we want an economy that works for people, not banks.

‘The comedian Russell Brand has stirred debate with his talk of revolution. Russell Brand is more right than wrong. Pre-revolutionary grievances are simmering in half the world, openly in France and Italy, less openly in Russia and China”, reads the article in the Telegraph of 21st November 2013 entitled “There is talk of revolution in the air” by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, International Business Editor.

He explains that the income inequality has been rising for 25 years almost everywhere:

“the income share of the richest 1pc of Americans reached a record 19.6pc last year. It never rose above 10pc for the whole post-War era until the mid-1980s.”

and argues that:

“quantitative easing as conducted in the rich countries risks making matters worse. The money is leaking into asset booms, without much economic trickle down.”

Instead of Quantitative Easing he offers an alternative :

Rather than relying on more bond purchases, the stimulus could be injected into the veins of the economy, or into the “income stream”

“We can spend it on roads, railways, smart electricity grids, or anything we want,” said Lord Turner, ex-chief of the Financial Services Authority. “Or we can cut taxes, targeting employers’ national insurance so that it creates jobs here and does not leak out.”

Sovereign Money Creation (SMC) offers a way to make the recovery sustainable. In a similar way to Quantitative Easing, SMC relies on the state creating money and putting this money into the economy. But whereas QE relied on flooding financial markets and hoping that some of this money would ‘trickle down’ to the real economy, SMC works by injecting new money directly into the real economy, via government spending, tax cuts or rebates. Our analysis shows that by getting spending power directly into the hands of the public, this new solution could be up to 37 times more effective than Quantitative Easing in boosting GDP.
The pivotal advantage of SMC is that unlike the Government’s current growth strategies – which all rely on an over-indebted household sector going even further into debt – SMC requires no increase in either household debt or Government debt. In fact, SMC can actually reduce the overall levels of household debt. It would also make banks more liquid and the economy fundamentally safer.
Similar ideas have recently been proposed by Lord Adair Turner, under the name Overt Money Finance. The March 2013 budget included a review of the monetary policy framework, which expressly permitted the Bank of England to use ‘unconventional policy instruments’ to support the government’s objectives for growth and employment, meaning that SMC could be used within the current operating framework.

I have known about Prosperity for a long time, and it is a worthwhile group of people involved in monetary reform. RS

Welcome to the website of PROSPERITY, a monthly Money Reform journal based in Glasgow, Scotland, which is dedicated to spreading understanding about the nature of our debt-based money system, and campaigning for publicly-created debt-free money. What is Money Reform?Money Reform (sometimes called, Monetary Reform) highlights the fact that our economy today is "debt-based", meaning that virtually all money is supplied into the economy as a debt owed to the private banking system. We are reliant upon this banking system for the supply of almost all our means of exchange. In Britain today, 97% of our money stock is created by this private banking system as a debt, while only 3% is created by the government debt-free. As we explain on this website, that is both a technical absurdity and a democratic offence.As a consequence of virtually all our money coming into existence as a debt, we see the indebtedness of people, families and countries growing daily. Money Reformers believe the present debt-based system perpetrates debt slavery, and this is destructive of society, the environment and the planet. Money Reformers believe this debt-based money supply is the big issue which governs all the issues.Money Reformers advocate that the virtual Monopoly of Money Creation must be removed from the private banking system and we work to establish a publicly-created supply of debt-free money, created on behalf of the people, by a public body. This money should be spent, not lent, into society on the basis of proven need. This will gradually reduce the overall burden of debt in society, break reliance upon the private banking system for the supply of money, open potential for change, and empower people democratically. The Money Reformers' proposal is not a left-wing, or right-wing idea. It's just good sense!

This website carries some of the articles, interviews, and reviews which have appeared in back-issues of our journal, and which investigate and explain the debt-based money system, and which publicise the debt-free alternative. If our debt-free Money Reform ideas are new to you then we recommend reading the following articles to obtain a comprehensive introduction to our case.For a short, general introduction to the problem of a debt-based money supply see Bankrolling the World into Chaos by author Michael Rowbotham, and also see his call that debt-free money is The Single Most Important Reform Then for a fully comprehensive explanation on how the banking system creates money for both private and commercial needs, including a description of how notes and coins are created, how banks create money for national needs, and how international debt is created, see How Money is Created.Bill Clarke explains The Case for Monetary Reform and emphasises the extent to which most people are unaware of the debt-based manner in which almost all money comes into existence. This article should be read with Richard Greaves' summary of The Negative Consequences of the Debt-Based Money System.Alistair McConnachie addresses the democratic necessity for Money Reform in his articles Money for the People and by the People and in Publicly-Created Money: The Democratic Imperative where he also deals with some frequently heard objections to the Money Reformers' debt-free money proposal.James Gibb Stuart is Making a Case for Money Reform and laying out a basic debt-free money proposal, while Ron Morrison deals with how such a proposal could be brought into operation, and advocates that we Establish a State Bank to provide society with a regular supply of debt-free money.

Prosperity developed from the meetings of the Bromsgrove Group which meets annually outside Bromsgrove, near Birmingham. Each issue carries the Group's Statement of Belief which is a succinct general summary of the Money Reform case. Prosperity does not promote any particular "brand" of monetary reform, nor are we critiquing the system from any particular political or religious perspective. It is edited and published by Alistair McConnachie and can be contacted at:

Cybernetics has been defined in a variety of ways, by a variety of people, from a variety of disciplines. The Larry Richards Reader includes a list of definitions:[6]

"The only branch of science and math concerned with the 'Limitations' of Evolution"—Taylor Kirkland

"Science concerned with the study of systems of any nature which are capable of receiving, storing and processing information so as to use it for control."—A. N. Kolmogorov

"The art of securing efficient operation."—L. Couffignal

"'The art of steersmanship': deals with all forms of behavior in so far as they are regular, or determinate, or reproducible: stands to the real machine -- electronic, mechanical, neural, or economic -- much as geometry stands to real object in our terrestrial space; offers a method for the scientific treatment of the system in which complexity is outstanding and too important to be ignored."—W. Ross Ashby

"A branch of mathematics dealing with problems of control, recursiveness, and information, focuses on forms and the patterns that connect."—Gregory Bateson

"The art of effective organization."—Stafford Beer

"The art and science of manipulating defensible metaphors."—Gordon Pask

"The art of creating equilibrium in a world of constraints and possibilities."—Ernst von Glasersfeld

"The science and art of understanding."—Humberto Maturana

"The ability to cure all temporary truth of eternal triteness."—Herbert Brun

"The science and art of the understanding of understanding."—Rodney E. Donaldson

"A way of thinking about ways of thinking of which it is one."—Larry Richards

The term cybernetics stems from κυβερνήτης (kybernētēs) "steersman, governor, pilot, or rudder" (the same root as government). As with the ancient Greek pilot, independence of thought is important in cybernetics.[7] Cybernetics is a broad field of study, but the essential goal of cybernetics is to understand and define the functions and processes of systems that have goals and that participate in circular, causal chains that move from action to sensing to comparison with desired goal, and again to action. Studies in cybernetics provide a means for examining the design and function of any system, including social systems such as business management and organizational learning, including for the purpose of making them more efficient and effective.
French physicist and mathematician André-Marie Ampère first coined the word "cybernetique" in his 1834 essay Essai sur la philosophie des sciences to describe the science of civil government.[8]
Cybernetics was borrowed by Norbert Wiener, in his book "Cybernetics", to define the study of control and communication in the animal and the machine.[9]Stafford Beer called it the science of effective organization and Gordon Pask called it "the art of defensible metaphors" (emphasizing its constructivist epistemology) though he later extended it to include information flows "in all media" from stars to brains. It includes the study of feedback, black boxes and derived concepts such as communication and control in living organisms, machines and organizations including self-organization. Its focus is how anything (digital, mechanical or biological) processes information, reacts to information, and changes or can be changed to better accomplish the first two tasks.[10] A more philosophical definition, suggested in 1956 by Louis Couffignal, one of the pioneers of cybernetics, characterizes cybernetics as "the art of ensuring the efficacy of action."[11] The most recent definition has been proposed by Louis Kauffman, President of the American Society for Cybernetics, "Cybernetics is the study of systems and processes that interact with themselves and produce themselves from themselves."[12]

The word cybernetics was first used in the context of "the study of self-governance" by Plato in The Alcibiades to signify the governance of people.[13] The word 'cybernétique' was also used in 1834 by the physicist André-Marie Ampère (1775–1836) to denote the sciences of government in his
classification system of human knowledge.

James Watt

The first artificial automatic regulatory system, a water clock, was invented by the mechanician Ktesibios. In his water clocks, water flowed from a source such as a holding tank into a reservoir, then from the reservoir to the mechanisms of the clock. Ktesibios's device used a cone-shaped float to monitor the level of the water in its reservoir and adjust the rate of flow of the water accordingly to maintain a constant level of water in the reservoir, so that it neither overflowed nor was allowed to run dry. This was the first artificial truly automatic self-regulatory device that required no outside intervention between the feedback and the controls of the mechanism. Although they did not refer to this concept by the name of Cybernetics (they considered it a field of engineering), Ktesibios and others such as Heron and Su Song are considered to be some of the first to study cybernetic principles.
The study of teleological mechanisms (from the Greek τέλος or telos for end, goal, or purpose) in machines with corrective feedback dates from as far back as the late 18th century when James Watt's steam engine was equipped with a governor, a centrifugal feedback valve for controlling the speed of the engine. Alfred Russel Wallace identified this as the principle of evolution in his famous 1858 paper. In 1868 James Clerk Maxwell published a theoretical article on governors, one of the first to discuss and refine the principles of self-regulating devices. Jakob von Uexküll applied the feedback mechanism via his model of functional cycle (Funktionskreis) in order to explain animal behaviour and the origins of meaning in general.

Contemporary cybernetics began as an interdisciplinary study connecting the fields of control systems, electrical network theory, mechanical engineering, logic modeling, evolutionary biology and neuroscience in the 1940s. Electronic control systems originated with the 1927 work of Bell Telephone Laboratories engineer Harold S. Black on using negative feedback to control amplifiers. The ideas are also related to the biological work of Ludwig von Bertalanffy in General Systems Theory.
Early applications of negative feedback in electronic circuits included the control of gun mounts and radar antenna during World War II. Jay Forrester, a graduate student at the Servomechanisms Laboratory at MIT during WWII working with Gordon S. Brown to develop electronic control systems for the U.S. Navy, later applied these ideas to social organizations such as corporations and cities as an original organizer of the MIT School of Industrial Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Forrester is known as the founder of System Dynamics.W. Edwards Deming, the Total Quality Management guru for whom Japan named its top post-WWII industrial prize, was an intern at Bell Telephone Labs in 1927 and may have been influenced by network theory. Deming made "Understanding Systems" one of the four pillars of what he described as "Profound Knowledge" in his book "The New Economics."
Numerous papers spearheaded the coalescing of the field. In 1935 Russian physiologist P.K. Anokhin published a book in which the concept of feedback ("back afferentation") was studied. The study and mathematical modelling of regulatory processes became a continuing research effort and two key articles were published in 1943. These papers were "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology" by Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener, and Julian Bigelow; and the paper "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity" by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts.
Cybernetics as a discipline was firmly established by Norbert Wiener, McCulloch and others, such as W. Ross Ashby, mathematician Alan Turing, and W. Grey Walter. Walter was one of the first to build autonomous robots as an aid to the study of animal behaviour. Together with the US and UK, an important geographical locus of early cybernetics was France.
In the spring of 1947, Wiener was invited to a congress on harmonic analysis, held in Nancy, France. The event was organized by the Bourbaki, a French scientific society, and mathematician Szolem Mandelbrojt (1899–1983), uncle of the world-famous mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot.

John von Neumann

During this stay in France, Wiener received the offer to write a manuscript on the unifying character of this part of applied mathematics, which is found in the study of Brownian motion and in telecommunication engineering. The following summer, back in the United States, Wiener decided to introduce the neologism cybernetics into his scientific theory. The name cybernetics was coined to denote the study of "teleological mechanisms" and was popularized through his book Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine (MIT Press/John Wiley and Sons, NY, 1948). In the UK this became the focus for the Ratio Club.
In the early 1940s John von Neumann, although better known for his work in mathematics and computer science, did contribute a unique and unusual addition to the world of cybernetics: von Neumann cellular automata, and their logical follow up the von Neumann Universal Constructor. The result of these deceptively simple thought-experiments was the concept of self replication which cybernetics adopted as a core concept. The concept that the same properties of genetic reproduction applied to social memes, living cells, and even computer viruses is further proof of the somewhat surprising universality of cybernetic study.
Wiener popularized the social implications of cybernetics, drawing analogies between automatic systems (such as a regulated steam engine) and human institutions in his best-selling The Human Use of Human Beings : Cybernetics and Society (Houghton-Mifflin, 1950).
While not the only instance of a research organization focused on cybernetics, the Biological Computer Lab at the University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign, under the direction of Heinz von Foerster, was a major center of cybernetic research for almost 20 years, beginning in 1958.

Artificial intelligence (AI) was founded as a distinct discipline at a 1956 conference. After some uneasy coexistence, AI gained funding and prominence. Consequently, cybernetic sciences such as the study of neural networks were downplayed; the discipline shifted into the world of social sciences and therapy.[14]
Prominent cyberneticians during this period include:

In the 1970s, new cyberneticians emerged in multiple fields, but especially in biology. The ideas of Maturana, Varela and Atlan, according to Dupuy (1986) "realized that the cybernetic metaphors of the program upon which molecular biology had been based rendered a conception of the autonomy of the living being impossible. Consequently, these thinkers were led to invent a new cybernetics, one more suited to the organizations which mankind discovers in nature - organizations he has not himself invented".[15] However, during the 1980s the question of whether the features of this new cybernetics could be applied to social forms of organization remained open to debate.[15]
In political science, Project Cybersyn attempted to introduce a cybernetically controlled economy during the early 1970s. In the 1980s, according to Harries-Jones (1988) "unlike its predecessor, the new cybernetics concerns itself with the interaction of autonomous political actors and subgroups, and the practical and reflexive consciousness of the subjects who produce and reproduce the structure of a political community. A dominant consideration is that of recursiveness, or self-reference of political action both with regards to the expression of political consciousness and with the ways in which systems build upon themselves".[16]
One characteristic of the emerging new cybernetics considered in that time by Felix Geyer and Hans van der Zouwen, according to Bailey (1994),[17] was "that it views information as constructed and reconstructed by an individual interacting with the environment. This provides an epistemological foundation of science, by viewing it as observer-dependent. Another characteristic of the new cybernetics is its contribution towards bridging the micro-macro gap. That is, it links the individual with the society".[17] Another characteristic noted was the "transition from classical cybernetics to the new cybernetics [that] involves a transition from classical problems to new problems. These shifts in thinking involve, among others, (a) a change from emphasis on the system being steered to the system doing the steering, and the factor which guides the steering decisions.; and (b) new emphasis on communication between several systems which are trying to steer each other".[17]
Recent endeavors into the true focus of cybernetics, systems of control and emergent behavior, by such related fields as game theory (the analysis of group interaction), systems of feedback in evolution, and metamaterials (the study of materials with properties beyond the Newtonian properties of their constituent atoms), have led to a revived interest in this increasingly relevant field.[10]

By examining group behavior through the lens of cybernetics, sociologists can seek the reasons for such spontaneous events as smart mobs and riots, as well as how communities develop rules such as etiquette by consensus without formal discussion[citation needed]. Affect Control Theory explains role behavior, emotions, and labeling theory in terms of homeostatic maintenance of sentiments associated with cultural categories. The most comprehensive attempt ever made in the social sciences to increase cybernetics in a generalized theory of society was made by Talcott Parsons. In this way, cybernetics establishes the basic hierarchy in Parsons' AGIL paradigm, which is the ordering system-dimension of his action theory. These and other cybernetic models in sociology are reviewed in a book edited by McClelland and Fararo.[19]

The concept was introduced by Gihan Sami Soliman; an educational consultant, as a project idea to be implemented with the help of two team members in Sinai. The Sinai Sustainability Cybernetics Center announced as a semi-finalist project by MIT annual competition 2013.,[20][21][22],.[23] The project idea proposed relating education to sustainable development through an IMS project that applies a multiple educational program related to the original natural self-healing system of life on earth. Education, sustainable development, social justice disciplines interact in a casual circular relationship that education would contribute to the development of the local community in Sinai village, on both sustainability and social responsibility levels while the community itself provides a unique learning environment that will contribute to the development of the educational program in a closed signaling loop.

Nicolas Schöffer's CYSP I (1956) was perhaps the first artwork to explicitly employ cybernetic principles (CYSP is an acronym that joins the first two letters of the words "CYbernetic" and "SPatiodynamic").[24] The artist Roy Ascott elaborated an extensive theory of cybernetic art in "Behaviourist Art and the Cybernetic Vision" (Cybernetica, Journal of the International Association for Cybernetics (Namur), Volume IX, No.4, 1966; Volume X No.1, 1967) and in "The Cybernetic Stance: My Process and Purpose" (Leonardo Vol 1, No 2, 1968). Art historian Edward A. Shanken has written about the history of art and cybernetics in essays including "Cybernetics and Art: Cultural Convergence in the 1960s"[25] and "From Cybernetics to Telematics: The Art, Pedagogy, and Theory of Roy Ascott"(2003),[26] which traces the trajectory of Ascott's work from cybernetic art to telematic art (art using computer networking as its medium, a precursor to net.art.)

Biomechatronics relates to linking mechatronics to biological organisms, leading to systems that conform to A. N. Kolmogorov's definition of Cybernetics, i.e. "Science concerned with the study of systems of any nature which are capable of receiving, storing and processing information so as to use it for control".[citation needed] From this perspective mechatronics are considered technical cybernetics or engineering cybernetics.

Jump up ^"Definitions of Cybernetics". A Larry Richards Reader 1997–2007. 2008. pp. 9–11. "I developed this list of definitions/descriptions in 1987-88 and have been distributing it at ASC (American Society for Cybernetics)conferences since 1988. I added a few items to the list over the next two years, and it has remained essentially unchanged since then. My intent was twofold: (1) to demonstrate that one of the distinguishing features of cybernetics might be that it could legitimately have multiple definitions without contradicting itself, and (2) to stimulate dialogue on what the motivations (intentions, desires, etc.) of those who have proposed different definitions might be."

Jump up ^Leary,Timothy. "The Cyberpunk: the individual as reality pilot" in Storming the Reality Studio. Duke University Press: 1991.

Jump up ^Cariani, Peter (15 March 2010). "on the importance of being emergent". Constructivist Foundations5 (2): 89. Retrieved 13 August 2012. "artificial intelligence was born at a conference at dartmouth in 1956 that was organized by McCarthy, Minsky, rochester, and shannon, three years after the Macy conferences on cybernetics had ended (Boden 2006; McCorduck 1972). The two movements coexisted for roughly a de- cade, but by the mid-1960s, the proponents of symbolic ai gained control of national funding conduits and ruthlessly defunded cybernetics research. This effectively liq- uidated the subfields of self-organizing systems, neural networks and adaptive ma- chines, evolutionary programming, biologi- cal computation, and bionics for several de- cades, leaving the workers in management, therapy and the social sciences to carry the torch. i think some of the polemical pushing-and-shoving between first-order control theorists and second-order crowds that i witnessed in subsequent decades was the cumulative result of a shift of funding, membership, and research from the “hard” natural sciences to “soft” socio-psychologi- cal interventions."

^ Jump up to: abJean-Pierre Dupuy, "The autonomy of social reality: on the contribution of systems theory to the theory of society" in: Elias L. Khalil & Kenneth E. Boulding eds., Evolution, Order and Complexity, 1986.

Jump up ^Peter Harries-Jones (1988), "The Self-Organizing Polity: An Epistemological Analysis of Political Life by Laurent Dobuzinskis" in: Canadian Journal of Political Science (Revue canadienne de science politique), Vol. 21, No. 2 (Jun., 1988), pp. 431-433.

Jump up ^Note: this does not refer to the concept of Racial Memory but to the concept of cumulative adaptation to a particular niche, such as the case of the pepper moth having genes for both light and dark environments.

About Me

Robert Searle was educated in Windsor at the Royal Free, the Tutorials, and East Berkshire College. He is the originator of two major "work in progress" Paradigms known as Transfinancial Economics (TFE), and Multi-Dimensional Science (MDS).The former believes that new unearned money could be electronically created without serious inflation notably for key environmental, and
socially ethical projects. Multi-Dimensional Science though presents an unique "scientific" Methodology by which claimed psychic, and spiritual "phenomena"could possibly be "proved".
Apart from the above, Searle has proposed the development of the Universal Debating Project, an interactive "encyclopedia" of virtually "all" pro, and con arguments for practically any subject in the world.He is the creator too of a tribute blog on the musician, and broadcaster David Munrow (1942-1976), and a pioneering one on Contemporary Early Music.Furthermore, he has a very large audio-visual collection of Medieval, and Renaissance Music (manually created as Searle8), and has an "unusual" musical project involving improvisation which could also open up a "new" approach to music.